Turin district guide

"Do you know Turin?" asked Nietzsche. "It is a city after my own
heart ? a princely residence of the seventeenth century, which
has only one taste giving commands to everything, the court and
its nobility. Aristocratic calm is preserved in everything;
there are no nasty suburbs." Although TURIN 's traffic-choked
streets are no longer calm, and its suburbs are as dreary as any
in Italy, the city centre's gracious Baroque thoroughfares,
opulent palaces, sumptuous churches and splendid collections of
Egyptian antiquities and northern European paintings are still
there - a pleasant surprise to those who might have been
expecting satanic factories and little else.

Turin's suburbs were built by a new dynasty, Fiat (Fabbrica
Italiana di Automobili Torino), whose owner, Gianni Agnelli, is
reckoned to be the most powerful man in Italy. Although the only
sign of Agnelli's power appears to be the number of Fiats that
cram Turin's streets (as they do those of every other Italian
city), it's worth remembering that Fiat owns Alfa Romeo, Lancia,
Autobianchi and Ferrari too, accounting for more than sixty
percent of the Italian car market. But there are other, more
hidden branches of the Agnelli empire. Stop for a Cinzano in one
of the city's many fin de si?le caf? and you're drinking an
Agnelli vermouth; buy the La Stampa or Corriere della Sera
newspapers and you're reading newsprint produced by the Agnelli
family. Support the Juventus football team and you're supporting
the Agnellis who own it; or go for a Club Med skiing holiday at
the nearby resort of Sestriere and you'll sleep in hotels built
by Agnelli's grandfather. Wielding such power, Agnelli and
friends are seen as a political force in a country where
governments are relatively transient. Foreign governments often
take more notice of Agnelli than they do of Italy's elected
leaders: as Henry Kissinger once said, Gianni Agnelli "is the
permanent establishment". Terrorists too recognized where the
roots of Italian power lay: the Red Brigade was founded on the
factory floors of Fiat, and Fiat executives were as much targets
as were politicians.

The grid street-plan of Turin's Baroque centre makes it easy to
find your way about. Via Roma is the central spine of the city,
a grand affair lined with designer shops and ritzy caf?,
although nowadays on the grubby side. It is punctuated by the
city's most elegant piazzas, most notably Piazza San Carlo ,
close to which are some of the most prestigious museums. Piazza
Castello forms a fittingly grandiose, if hectic, conclusion to
Via Roma, with its royal palaces awash in a sea of traffic. From
here you can walk in a number of directions. To the west, Via
Pietro Micca leads to a cluster of pedestrianized shopping
streets, more relaxed than Via Roma and a good area to head to
during the evening passeggiata in summer. North lies Piazza
della Repubblica , a vast and rather shabby square given over to
a daily market. To the southeast, the porticoes of Via Po forge
down to the river, a short walk along which is the extensive
Parco del Valentino , home to some of the city's best nightlife.
Beyond lies the engaging Museo dell'Automobile , while the hills
across the river , which are peppered with the Art Deco villas
of the richest Torinese, shelter the Basilica di Superga and the
Stupingi Pala